The Japanese well remember Dec. 8, 1941, as the day when Japan went to war with the United States, attacking Hawaii's Pearl Harbor with aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy. They also don't forget Aug. 15, 1945, the day when Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers in World War II.
But we should not forget Sept. 18, 1931. On that night 77 years ago, Japan's Kwantung Army exploded a bomb on the rails of the South Manchurian Railway, a Japanese enterprise, at Liutiaogou, just north of Mukden (now Shenyang), and blamed Chinese troops for the blast. The Kwantung Army then began military operations in Manchuria. On March 1, 1932, Manchukuo — a puppet state of the Kwantung Army — was established.
The Manchurian Incident marked the start of Japan's long military campaigns that led to Japan's total but undeclared war with China — following the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937 — and to its war with the U.S. The 15-year-long war involved vast swaths of the Asia-Pacific region, causing great suffering to the people there as well as in Japanese colonies such as Korea and Taiwan, and in Japan itself. Areas occupied by Japan's military included Indochina, Malay Peninsula, Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), the Philippines and islands in the Pacific.